Was it a series of bad decisions that brought down the Romanovs?
Before the war, Nicholas II had vacillated between tolerating and cracking down on those civilian groups that wanted to transform this descendant of autocratic Greats (Peter and Catherine) into a constitutional monarch, and who accordingly pushed for a parliamentary counterweight to one-man rule in the form of the Duma.
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Hasegawa is at his most convincing when he points to Nicholas’s assumption of military command, swiftly followed by his dismissal of the Duma, as lighting the powder keg that led to two earth-shattering explosions in 1917; costing him not only his status and the war (so far as Russians were still concerned with that) but, in 1918, his life and those of his hapless, scheming but ultimately pathetic family.
As for writing style, he is academically meticulous but never dry to the point of unreadability. Is this, as the blurb tells us, going to become the definitive account of the Tsar’s demise? I doubt it: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The Romanovs, with its range of anecdotes, is more compelling.
Yet Hasegawa cannot be faulted for insularity. Another work with claims to definitiveness, Keith Neilsen’s Britain and the Last Tsar (1996), argued unconvincingly that in 1914 Britain should have been less worked up about Germany than Russia’s long-term threat to its supreme ranking among the Great Powers.
Hasegawa’s special talent lies in illustrating the psychological truth of how one leader’s insecurity can end up costing the lives of millions of people who never met him.
The cult of personality didn’t begin with the Communists. And, as we can see every day of the week from Moscow to Washington and around the globe, it didn’t end with them. Hasegawa mounts a seductive argument – one that will half-persuade you if you’re already enrolled in the other, deterministic school – that individuals are the motor, driver and navigator of history all rolled into one.
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